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Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

blog.atom.io

21–30 of 176 posts

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#22
post #3

I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on this front, or are the performance issues intrinsic?

I see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript which is hip at the moment.

The reason it comes up so often is because it's very noticeable even on late-model systems with SSDs. Just as with Java-based IDEs, the previous target of these complaints, many people tolerate it anyway because they find the features balance out raw speed.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#23
post #3

I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on this front, or are the performance issues intrinsic?

I see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript which is hip at the moment.

It is certainly slower than Sublime, and is so on well-speced machines. I have machines with i7s, 16gb of ram, and an SSD, and atom still chokes when dealing with large amounts of data. Try multiple selections on large text files and watch it grind to a halt.

Certainly people are falling in love with Atom. It is open source ("hackable editor", as they say at Github), and of course this leads to a much quicker development cycle. Sublime has been criticized because features and updates are few and far between, and there appears to be a reluctance to open-source it.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#24
post #20
post #10

I have been ignoring the Atom hype because "geeze a programmers editor written as a big blob of JavaScript on my desktop that sounds like a dumb idea". Then I tried it and it's wonderful and magical.

Could you highlight some of the reasons you liked it?

My most appreciated feature is having a user interface for plugin settings.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#25
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see this comment every time an Atom post gets on HN. Are you sure it's not just your computer specs? If Atom continually makes the HN front page then many people must be using it just fine and like it? Personally I'm not sure why we need another text editor of all things, but hey its made in javascript which is hip at the moment.

A quad core, 16GB RAM rMBP with SSD should really be able to run a text editor for a 500 line Python file without caret lagging behind typing :/ Sublime can do it easily, Atom still can't. Am I holding it wrong?

No, Atom is just slower.

16GB, 4790k with SSD.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#26
post #3

I don't really want more features for Atom. I just want it to be faster. Right now it's incredibly sluggish compared to e.g. Sublime. Is there any hope on this front, or are the performance issues intrinsic?

Is there any chance to use Rust or Go to develop an Atom package? Not for the entire codebase, just for the parts which might be a bottleneck.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#27

that's beautiful... suddenly I resent my decade long addiction to a certain other editor. kinda. Does anyone have experience using vim-mode?

As a longtime Vim user, I've been pleasantly surprised with the quality of Atom's Vim bindings. Text navigation and pane management bindings mostly work as expected. You get multiple registers for yanking etc. That's the extent of what you get, however. There's no emulation for the colon prompt, no macros, and it obviously doesn't support any Vim scripting.

I've been happy with Atom after transitioning from Vim, but there are still a few pain points. One that's particular annoying is that Atom's search/replace is very poor compared to the power I'm used to having with :%s.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#28
I really wish there was a way to use Atom in client/server mode. I'd like to leave a headless session running on my home Linux server and be able to attach to it from work. Right now, I use SSHFS to mount the remote directory so I can edit locally, but it leaves a lot to be desired.

Considering that Atom is all just Node and Chromium under the hood, it's surprising that there's no way to run at is as a server.

Re: Atom 1.6 Released with Pending Pane Items, Async Git and Top and Bottom Bar API

#30
The new features and updates are great, but the one thing holding me back from using it is the fact it is extremely slow and laden with performance issues. Anyone who has ever attempted to open a file with a lot of lines of code will attest to the fact that Atom has issues.

Ironically, Microsoft's open source Visual Studio Code editor is based in part of some aspects of Atom and it has exceptional performance and is a great editor in comparison. They need to focus on fixing the slowness. VSCode proved that Electron is not the bottleneck but rather Atom's code itself is.

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